Month: March 2017

Over a decade ago now I got my first team lead role. It was a reasonably unexpected promotion when the existing team lead left shortly after I joined. This baptism of fire introduced me to line management, but also made me question my career choice. But it was, in hindsight, the beginning of a new journey: of becoming a software craftsman.

With barely 5 years experience I was certainly no senior developer. And yet, here I had been thrust, into a team lead role. With so little experience I made many, many mistakes and was probably a pretty rubbish boss for the three other guys on the team. I tried my best. But the whole process was very draining. But worse, I started to see programming at a more abstract level. In charge of a team, I could see that all we were was a factory for turning requirements into working code. The entire process began to feel like turning a handle: feed the team requirements, some praise and a little coffee and out comes working code.

In the end, a lot of software ends up being very similar: how many CRUD apps does the world really need? Turns out billions of them. And yet, in conception, they’re not massively exciting. Take a piece of data from the user, shovel it back to the database. Take some data out of the database, show it to the user. All very pedestrian. All very repetitive. In this environment it’s easy to become disillusioned with the process of building software. A pointless handle turning exercise.

I moved on from this baptism of fire to my first proper management role. Whereas previously I was still writing code, now I was effectively a full-time manager. I was the team’s meeting and bullshit buffer. It took a lot of buffering. There was a lot of bullshit. I think we even once managed a meeting to discuss why productivity was so poor: maybe the vast number of meetings I was required to attend each day? Or could it have been the 300 emails a day that arrived in my inbox?

If I was disillusioned with the process of writing software before, I now became disillusioned with the entire industry. A large company, little more than a creche for adults, continuing forwards more out of momentum than anything else. Plenty of emails and meetings every day to stop you from having to worry too much about any of that pesky work business.

It was then that I opened my eyes and saw there was a community outside. That programmers across the world were meeting up and discussing what we do. The first thing I saw was the agile community – but even back then it already looked like a vast pyramid scheme. But I was encouraged that there was something larger happening than the dysfunctional companies I kept finding myself working for.

Then Sandro Mancuso and I started talking about software craftsmanship. He introduced me to this movement that seemed to be exactly what I thought was missing in the industry. Not the agile money-go-round, but a movement where the focus is on doing the job right; on life-long learning; on taking pride in your work.

Not long afterwards Sandro and I setup the London Software Craftsmanship Community, which quickly snowballed. It seems we weren’t alone in believing that the job can be done well, that the job should be done well. Soon hundreds of developers joined the community.

The first immediate consequence of my involvement in the software craftsmanship community was discovering a new employer: TIM Group. A company that genuinely has a focus on software built well, with pair programming and TDD. A company where you can take pride in a job done well. The most professional software organisation I’ve worked in. They’re almost certainly still hiring, so if you’re looking, you should definitely talk to them.

Finally I’d found the antidote to my disillusionment with how software is often built: the reason I was frustrated is that it was being built badly. That companies often encourage software to be built slapdash and without care, either implicitly or sometimes even explicitly. If building software feels like just turning a handle it’s because you’re not learning anything. If you’re not learning, it’s because you’re not trying to get better at the job. Don’t tell me you’re already perfect at writing software, I don’t believe it.

Through software craftsmanship I rediscovered my love of programming. My love of a job done well. The fine focus on details that has always interested me. But not just the fine details of the code itself: the fine details of how we build it. The mechanics of TDD done well, of how it should feel. I discovered that as I became more senior not only did I find I had so much more to learn, but now I could also teach others. Not only can I take pride in a job done well, but pride in helping others improve, pride in their job done well.